In conventional systems, it has been possible to easily create an electronic catalog for supporting business by inserting managed master data into an electronic catalog template and generating a catalog.
Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2005-122307 proposes a technique in which text data to be inserted into form data and form data to be applied to the text data are managed in association with each other with the use of a book ID. In Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2005-122307, it is assumed that one text data and one form data are associated with each other.
In the above conventional system, however, data to be inserted are uniformly handled, and therefore, recommended articles for active promotion, such as campaign articles, and other articles are equivalently handled. Data are not differentiated from one another as described-above, and therefore, when a catalog of multiple articles matching a user requirement is outputted, all the articles are equivalently handled in the output.
Therefore, a lot of pages are required, and the cost for paper, consumables and the like for color printing is increased. Furthermore, there are problems such as that it is impossible to highlight particular data, such as data of recommended articles.
It is possible to highlight particular articles by outputting each article individually in a different template and manually arranging the printed matters later. However, outputting each article individually in a different template in this way requires a very troublesome work. Recently, it is required to dynamically manage association of data to be inserted on demand and form data with each other.